Edward R Murrow

"This . . . is London." Those famous words have crackled through history just as they did across the airwaves when Edward R. Murrow spoke them from a city aflame from German bombs in the early years of World War II. Just as his voice then provided Americans with a daily link to the suffering of England, so does the mere mention of his name today connect us to the glory days of news broadcasting.

George Stevens Jr. was brought into the family business as a teenager when he worked as a production assistant on the 1953 Western classic "Shane," which his father, George Stevens, was directing. After college, he joined the crew of his dad's 1956 epic "Giant," for which the filmmaker won his second best directing Oscar, and then shot the location footage in Amsterdam for his father's 1959 drama, "The Diary of Anne Frank. " "I think I was the first one who directed a major part of one of his pictures," Stevens said in a recent interview.

Who will be the major voices of TV news in the 1990s? Who's in? Who's out? With the decade's first TV season about to unfold this fall, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw have clearly faded in the ratings as network audiences shrink. Big changes ahead. And in a splendid irony, two special programs--this week's "Real Life With Jane Pauley" on NBC and Monday's "Edward R. Murrow: This Reporter" on PBS--suggest the radical and mind-boggling surgery that network TV news has undergone.

Joseph Wershba, a pioneering CBS reporter and producer whose work on Edward R. Murrow's "See It Now" series in the 1950s helped expose the McCarthy era's communist witch hunt and demonstrated the power of television, has died. He was 90. Wershba, a two-time Emmy Award winner who was one of the original segment producers on "60 Minutes," died Saturday of pneumonia at North Shore Hospital on Long Island, said his wife, Shirley. In what became a more than 50-year career in broadcast and print journalism, Wershba joined CBS radio as a news writer in New York in 1944 and later worked on Murrow's "Hear It Now" radio series before it moved to television in 1952 as "See It Now. " Wershba was the on-camera reporter and field producer on "The Case Against Lt. Milo Radulovich A0589839," a 1953 "See It Now" segment that demonstrated the excesses and dangers of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusade and the effects of guilt by association.

Edward R. Murrow's dispatches from London at the beginning of World War II remain models of concision, 50 years after he delivered them over CBS radio. He summarizes the "hard news" of diplomatic crises and parliamentary debates clearly, but is at his best reporting the human side of the struggle.

"Good Night, and Good Luck" couldn't be more unlikely, more unfashionable -- or more compelling. Everything about it -- its look, its style, even its sound -- stands in stark opposition to the trends of the moment. Yet by sticking to events that are half a century old, it tells a story whose implications for today are inescapable. An examination of the stand CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow took in 1954 against Sen.

Edward R. Murrow is rolling over in his grave at how often people say he is rolling over in his grave. Perhaps no one's name has been more commonly affixed to the "rolling over in his grave" cliche as Murrow's, the pioneering broadcaster who made CBS the seminal name in radio and television news during the middle of the 20th century.

Playboy Bunny Sheriann Glass' superstructure is obviously superior to her sentence structure, and both are more impressive than what she passed off as thinking (Calendar Letters, April 13). Her rationale for posing nude was as profound as the classic statements of beauty pageant contestants ("I want to help all mankind and be a billionaire"). Sheriann may indeed "make it to the top" as a broadcast journalist. Kind of makes you glad Edward R. Murrow wasn't a curvy blonde. SUZON FORSCEY Claremont

In "CBS' Bill Stout Getting Star Today" (Feb. 3) Dennis McDougal states that Edward R. Murrow "was a radio actor before he launched into his broadcast journalism career." I checked several sources, including A.M. Sperber's definitive biography of Murrow, and none of them indicate that Murrow ever performed as a radio actor. Indeed, each source indicates that Murrow started as an executive and became a broadcaster only by accident when he was the only person available in Austria when Hitler entered the country in 1938.

Longtime "Meet the Press" moderator Tim Russert's office, complete with Buffalo Bills pennants and a journalist's clutter, will go on display next month at the Newseum in Washington. The office will be reassembled to look as it did June 13, 2008, the day Russert died of a heart attack at age 58 while recording voice-overs for his next show at NBC's Washington bureau. The exhibit at the journalism museum opens Nov. 20 and will remain through 2010. "After Tim's death, it became very clear to us that Tim really hit a nerve with a wider swath of people than you would ordinarily think for a journalist," Charles Overby, the Newseum's chief executive, said Wednesday.

A longtime home of film comic Groucho Marx is listed in Beverly Hills at $6,995,000. The Spanish-style estate has been maintained by the same family for the last half-century. Marx's initials are carved into the concrete in two spots — the driveway and near the pool. A copper storage unit that the actor made in the upstairs office to store his signature cigars is intact. Fruit trees that he planted remain on the property. Marx was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow in the house in the '50s.

Longtime "Meet the Press" moderator Tim Russert's office, complete with Buffalo Bills pennants and a journalist's clutter, will go on display next month at the Newseum in Washington. The office will be reassembled to look as it did June 13, 2008, the day Russert died of a heart attack at age 58 while recording voice-overs for his next show at NBC's Washington bureau. The exhibit at the journalism museum opens Nov. 20 and will remain through 2010. "After Tim's death, it became very clear to us that Tim really hit a nerve with a wider swath of people than you would ordinarily think for a journalist," Charles Overby, the Newseum's chief executive, said Wednesday.

KATIE COURIC's lagging ratings on prime-time news shouldn't surprise ["Couric in an Unfamiliar Place -- 3rd," by Matea Gold, Oct. 11]. She has no pedigree of in-the-trenches reporting. Couric honed her skills with bouncy light banter and human interest stories on morning TV. A sudden makeover into the gravitas of evening news doesn't fool anyone. Add to this off-putting commentaries like her chiding President Clinton for defending himself against a revisionist right-wing blame game on terrorism, and the doubts grow.

SINCE making his film debut 25 years ago in good friend John Sayles' first feature, "Return of the Secaucus 7," David Strathairn has become one of American cinema's most versatile and complex actors. "He's an actor who is able to play a text and subtext," Sayles has said of the actor, whom he met while attending Williams College. Strathairn, 56, has collaborated with Sayles several times on films, including "Matewan" and "Eight Men Out."

"Good Night, and Good Luck" couldn't be more unlikely, more unfashionable -- or more compelling. Everything about it -- its look, its style, even its sound -- stands in stark opposition to the trends of the moment. Yet by sticking to events that are half a century old, it tells a story whose implications for today are inescapable. An examination of the stand CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow took in 1954 against Sen.

KATIE COURIC's lagging ratings on prime-time news shouldn't surprise ["Couric in an Unfamiliar Place -- 3rd," by Matea Gold, Oct. 11]. She has no pedigree of in-the-trenches reporting. Couric honed her skills with bouncy light banter and human interest stories on morning TV. A sudden makeover into the gravitas of evening news doesn't fool anyone. Add to this off-putting commentaries like her chiding President Clinton for defending himself against a revisionist right-wing blame game on terrorism, and the doubts grow.

Charles Collingwood, a Beau Brummell among war correspondents, whom Edward R. Murrow hired as a youngster and launched into a brilliant broadcasting career that spanned four decades of war, peace and war again, died Thursday of cancer. A CBS spokeswoman announced in Los Angeles that Collingwood was 68 and died in Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. He had undergone surgery for colon cancer last December, and doctors then said his chances for recovery were good.

Edward R. Murrow is rolling over in his grave at how often people say he is rolling over in his grave. Perhaps no one's name has been more commonly affixed to the "rolling over in his grave" cliche as Murrow's, the pioneering broadcaster who made CBS the seminal name in radio and television news during the middle of the 20th century.

I was sitting in my office heeding someone's advice to take a deep breath, chill out and mull recent events in a calm, organized manner, when I seem to have dozed off. Then the phone rang. It was the spirit of Edward R. Murrow. Murrow, who virtually invented broadcast news in a radio and television career at CBS spanning the New Deal and Tonkin Gulf.